At Goldman, You Start Among the 2%

Out of 17,000 applicants, just 350 college students made the cut and will begin their investment banking summer internships next week at Goldman Sachs offices around the world.

That is roughly the same yield as prior years, a 2% acceptance rate. It’s easier to get into Harvard or Stanford.

The 10-week program, which kicked off with an orientation on Thursday in the bank’s Jersey City offices, is supposed to immerse the summer analysts in the Goldman culture and teach them the “benefits and responsibilities of being a member of Goldman Sachs,” according to the firm’s website. (They look immersed in their official photo, courtesy of the Goldman Twitter account.)

Students entering the program are typically in their summer between junior and senior year in college.

Goldman’s website offers a tiny glimpse into the program. “After training, you will receive real responsibilities to give you a sense of what you would be doing, day to day, as a full time Goldman Sachs employee. Along with fellow interns, you will work alongside leaders within our industry.”

No mention of “God’s Work.”

The actual lure may be more obvious: A majority of the summer analysts wind up getting hired by the firm as full-time, full-fledged Goldman investment-banking analysts after graduation.

The steady interest in the internship comes even after the firm took a public-perception shellacking and after Goldman ended two-year contracts for investment-banking analysts and said it would no longer pay program completion bonuses.

To become a 2 percenter, the 350 entering interns had to fill out a multi-step application online that raked over everything from their SAT and other university admission scores to leadership experiences, language and technology skills and potential personal conflicts with working at the firm.

Applicants also had to submit a resume and a 300-word cover letter describing the qualities they would bring to Goldman and their motivations for applying. And of course they had to survive a round of interviews.

“We have no problem attracting people,” Gary Cohn, Goldman’s president, said at a conference on Thursday about the applicants to the program. “I won’t say they’re all highly qualified, but the vast majority were highly qualified kids that wanted to come to work at Goldman Sachs for the summer and do the internship program.”